


silverthorn

by amyelouise



Category: The X-Files
Genre: AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 17:54:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8337220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyelouise/pseuds/amyelouise
Summary: It had been twenty years since her blood had spilled on her sister's apartment floor.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Post-revival. No copyright infringement intended. Enjoy! X

It is her 53rd birthday when she hears that familiar timbre through her phone, and she sucks the air into her throat so harshly that she has to struggle not to cough. She hadn't heard that voice in decades. 

Her knuckles are white as they grasp onto the receiver as if it were her oxygen, her lifeline, and her hand slightly shakes as she listens to the steady breathing next to her ear.

"Dana?"

She remembers San Diego, a little girl with blue eyes and chubby red cheeks, and mysterious phone calls from beyond the grave. She's not quite sure she can do this a second time, to run into the dark unknowing of what to expect. Her breath hitches in her throat as she imagines another child, now grown and matured, but possibly still as ill, hanging onto life by sheer will alone. Could she possibly afford to lose another? 

"Dana, are you there?"

She snaps back to reality and takes a deep breath, cleansing her mind of men without faces and losing months worth of memories. If her sister wanted to talk to her, then so be it. How could she ever deny her sister?

"I'm here." She takes a furtive glance around her apartment and sits in her chair, her fingers playing restlessly with the edge of her shirt. "What do you want to tell me Missy? What have you found?" She feels a tear slip down her alabaster cheeks, hollowed by years of running and heartbreak. She'd be lying if she said she'd been eating properly since she moved states.

"Dana... I... How did you? How did you know it was me?" This wasn't how it was supposed to go. She wasn't sure of what she was expecting, maybe a cryptic message or a short phrase, but the sound of a soft, sniffling Melissa, sounding unsure and scared caught her off guard. She remembers sitting on her bed in their room, stroking her sister's hair as she lay in her lap recounting exactly how she'd walked in on her boyfriend with another girl, tears streaming down her glowing cheeks. She never liked to see Melissa cry. Melissa almost never cried. "Dana, I've missed you so much."

"I miss you too." It's a quiet confession, and she's not quite sure why she said it. It wouldn't make any difference. Her sister was dead. Missing her wouldn't bring her back. 

"I found your number in the white pages. I've been looking so long." She wipes her tears away with the back of her hand and sits up straighter, waiting for her brain to clear. She never thought apparitions used the white pages to haunt their family members. "I have to meet you."

"What?" She stands up and looks at her mobile, the unknown number staring back at her. It's an ordinary number, not unlike hers. It would be easy enough to track, and she wonders for a second if she should bother Danny for a trace, although it's now 11pm and she's sure he wouldn't be so willing to call in as many favours like he used to in the nineties. "Who are you? Why are you doing this? Why are you impersonating my sister?" Her voice rises and rises until she can hear the words come out shaky and broken, as if they were grooves on a vinyl that had too many scratches.

"Meet me and let me explain." Her fists ball up and she bashes one against her wall, threatening to dent it, and her vision blurs as salty tears seep into view. 

"Goddamn you, who are you?!" The doctor inside of her registers that her heart is beating two times quicker than it should, and the tremble she feels in her fingers and the cold touch that darts across her skin is from the early onsets of shock. "You son of a bitch, tell me who you are!" Her neighbours will complain to her in the morning, but she doesn't care. If the residents in her old building could cope with constant gunshots and crime scenes, the new ones could deal with this small break in her stony silence.

"It's Missy. It's your sister."

//

They agree to meet in Missouri, opposite the hospital where she now works as a doctor, mending little children whose hearts were born outside their bodies. She feels the heavy, comforting weight of her gun against her back and she palms it through the back of her shirt, carefully making sure her blazer hides the obvious bulge of metal from prying eyes.

Melissa spots her first, cheeks thinner than the last time they spoke, face more pointed, hair a tad lighter but eyes the same electric blue. She smiles as she sees her sister approach the glass windows of the cafe and search the insides, and she wondered how Dana would describe her after so many years of separation. 

She's sitting down in a comfy chair, two mugs of coffee already on the table before her, and she has that same smile, that same grin, the one she used to wear when they perfectly executed a prank on Bill, or when she'd managed to smuggle some wine upstairs to their bedroom. She jumps slightly as she feels her long lost sister's arms thread around her back, and she holds the tears back, her face stoic and her body rigid. 

"Danes... look at you..." She allows herself to cup Melissa's cheek, and her thumb brushes against the crinkles next to her eye, smoothing her skin, looking for something inorganic or fake. She can hear her crying next to her ear and she tries not to worry about the other customers and their wandering eyes. "It's been so long. I've missed you so much." 

They sit opposite each other, eyes watery and hands weary as Melissa recounts stories of faked deaths and mysterious disappearances. She tells her of a man who smelled of fresh cigarettes, how he had kept her and hid her from view.

"I managed to slip away after everything that happened last year. He was too distracted. I got out of that house and I ran, Dana. I didn't have a destination but I felt like I knew the way." Her eyes avert as she remembers those dreaded months, watching Mulder fight for his life in a hospital bed as she struggled to find anything that could cure him, anything except for their lost son. "I tried to find you as soon as I could, as soon as I could stand on my own two feet, but I couldn't find you in Virginia, or Maryland."

She stares blankly in front of her. It was all so convenient. Her hand moves to the back of her neck and she scratches at the scar there. This was not the first time the smoking man had provided them with a lost sibling under dubious circumstances, only to leave them with more questions than answers, and alone, again. She was alone now, with Mulder hooked up to life support 24/7, his body not having moved of its own accord for nearly an entire year. She travels back to visit him every month, and maybe his head is tilted in a different direction than last time, evidence of the nurses attention, but his eyelids wouldn't flutter like they did when he dreamt, and as she curled her fingers around his, they didn't tighten, even if she asked him to.

She snapped back to her maybe sister and decided that she was not going to let that man rule her life any longer. She would not be tempted by him and his empty promises. She would get into her car and drive away and forget about this. Forget about the clone and her sweet lies. She sits there and endures the rest of their meeting, her mask of ice only cracking when Melissa tells her of sitting next to their mother's grave, wishing she had one more moment with her to say goodbye. They finish their coffee at the same time like they always did, and Melissa takes her hand, running her fingers over her palm as if she were reading the marks on her skin. 

"It really is me Dana. I don't know how else to prove it to you. But I think deep down, you know the truth." She reaches over then and places her hand on her sister's heart, her eyes warm and liquid. "I will do any test you want, if it means I can have my sister back." Melissa feels her hand become covered by her sister's smaller, more capable fingers, and she smiles, feeling her heart beat under her palm. 

"Let's take a walk."

//

They end up at a park inhabited by men and women in suits, on lunch break from their 9 to 5 jobs, and a few mothers pushing their prams ahead of them down a scenic path. Dana admits to herself, that this woman is a very good copy of her sister, they've even got the way she fiddles with her fingers whilst she walks, and the delicate flutter of her eyelashes against her cheeks as she sighs. 

She's not quite sure if she wants to let go of her just yet. She is both unnerved and comforted by this woman's presence, this _thing's_ presence, so she keeps her expression unreadable as her emotions fly and spark like fireworks inside of her. She's almost scared to take her back to the hospital, to have her undergo every test known to man, to undeniably prove with scientific evidence that this woman was real, she was human, and she was her sister.

They recount stories of their joint pasts, parties they attended, boys they fought over, destinations they travelled to. Dimly in her mind, she remembers that clones and alien bounty hunters only inherit looks, not memories. They retell stories that they have learned, not lived through. And yet, who else could have known about that time they got high together in college, alone, or the time where they sat on the beach in California in the middle of the night, feet dipping into the ocean as they filled their lungs with nicotine and traced the constellations with their fingers. 

Maybe Melissa was right, maybe she did believe.

"I want to believe..." She'd interrupted a story about their childhood, Bill and Charlie holding both their sisters down onto the dewy grass on a navy base as their father sprayed them with a hose pipe. She watched as Melissa nodded and carried on walking, her gait wider than her own, her thin legs longer. 

They stop at a bench opposite a fountain and she watches a child toss a coin into the water. She closes her eyes and makes a wish even though it wasn't hers to make. She wishes for her sister to be sitting next to her. She opens her eyes slowly and turns to her left to see Melissa reaching behind them, admiring the berries growing on the shrubs. She holds a branch and picks one, depositing it into her sister's open palm.

"Eat it. They're nice." She eyes the fruit suspiciously as Melissa goes back for a second, and her head whips around as she hears a sharp hiss from beside her.

"Shit." She sucks her finger into her mouth and winces. "Thorns," she says around her digit, and her sister reaches out to hold her wrist, pulling her hand from her mouth. She watches the slightly reddened finger tip as a dot of crimson blood seeps from beneath her skin and slides towards her nail. "I'm fine Danes, don't worry."

She lets the berry fall from her palm onto the floor as she covers her mouth, her eyes screwed shut and her mouth open as she lets out an almighty wail, her other hand clutching at her sister's shoulder, pulling her closer and closer into a tight embrace until her face is buried into her soft neck.

"Missy, Missy, Missy." Her name is a prayer spilled from her lips and she cries for the two decades she spent without her, mourning her. She cries for a mother who will never know the truth, a brother who will never believe it, a child who will never know their aunty. 

She keeps thinking, she bleeds. She bleeds and aliens don't. Bounty hunters leak effervescent green liquid, and The Faceless are full to the brim with Black Oil. Only humans bleed red sticky blood. She's sure there are people staring at these two strange women caught in an awkward and hurried embrace, their bodies getting used to the feel of each other again. She inhales the heady scent of incense from her sister's clothes and she thinks, yes, I do believe. This is my sister. 

My sister is Melissa Scully, and she is alive, and in my arms.

//

She travels with her to see Mulder the next month, and she places her hand over his chest, her eyes closed and lips slightly parted. 

"Just as I thought." Her ears prick for her sister's diagnosis, and she waits patiently, her hand enclosed over his. "He's still here, he's still in the room with us. I think you should stay with him in Washington Dana. He needs you just like you needed him." She nods and looks over at her partner, her lover, her perfect opposite, and smiles. 

"Wake up Mulder, else Missy will kick your ass." 

They agree to visit him again tomorrow, and she calls her work, telling them that she won't be back in for a few days. They travel in companionable silence to her house, and as she steps out of the car to unlock the gate, it hits her that she hasn't been back to this place in seven months. They trudge through the wet grass until they reach the front door, and Missy smiles at the small Buddha statue next to the empty fish tank on the side cabinet.

She is sipping tea at the table when her sister returns from upstairs, her wooly pyjamas swamping her tiny frame and another pair draped across her arm. She strips in the living room because there's nothing to hide, no one to peek, and her sister waits until she sits back down in her seat and once again picks up her mug.

"I have something for you." She walks behind her and places her hands cooly on her shoulders, brushing the long strands of hair away from her neck. Her thumb drifts across the unmarred patch of skin, and she feels her own neck burn. They both had been through enough because of that man, just her scars were easier to see. Melissa felt something wrap around the column of her throat and she smiled as she felt the familiarity of the velvet caress her cool skin.

"You kept it."

"It was your favourite. I could never throw it away."

She stands and walks over to the mirror on the opposite wall, her fingers playing with the small crystal in the middle of her neck, and tears come unbidden to her eyes. She watches as her sister walks into view, and suddenly it is the two of them together in the reflection, same blue eyes and red hair. She welcomes the warmth her sister offers her as she wraps her arms around her middle, and she smiles as the light catches her crystal and makes it shine, a delicate rainbow being painted across her clear skin.

"Out of darkness, cometh light."

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this tweet: https://twitter.com/sassy_scully/status/789284108639801344
> 
> "Out of darkness cometh light" is my home city's motto.
> 
> MELISSA SCULLY DESERVED BETTER!


End file.
